Kiki’s Delivery Service is the last of Hayao Miyazaki’s great feature films that I have come to write about here in the film diary. Over the years since 2002 when I started writing about every feature film that I watched in full, I’ve seen and written about each and every one of his films now except for Kiki.

It’s not that I haven’t seen Kiki. It’s not that I don’t really love Kiki. It’s just that somehow, over these past 12 or 13 years, I didn’t sit and watch Kiki in total.

I’m sure that I saw it in parts over that time. I regularly showed my kids Miyazaki’s films, wandering in and out, often sitting through them all. And Kiki, even before I had kids or wrote in the film diary, was a film that I bought on VHS for nieces and nephews and watched many, many a time.

This viewing came from a request by Clara, who noted that she hadn’t seen it in a long time, and as Miyazaki’s films are her personal favorite, she wanted to see “one of his big films” (seriously, her words).

Made on the heels of My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki is another of Miyazaki’s most gentle and kid-friendly G-rated stories. For so many filmmakers, that might easily become a pejorative but here it’s just a point of clarity. Totoro, Kiki, and Ponyo (2009) are a wonderful, fantastical set of films that could be played for even the youngest of children. Others of his films are more complex or frightening, but these three are pure loveliness at that level of parental rating.

The story of a 13 year old witch who travels to a new village with her talking cat, Jiji (Phil Hartman) is one of those things that you might have a harder time convincing an adult to watch than a small child. Her skills yet undeveloped, she begins delivering things from a small bakery, meets a young boy enraptured by all things flight, and culminates with a dramatic rescue from a rogue dirigible.

It’s a very simple, very lovely piece of animation. Perhaps not quite as iconic as Totoro, it’s wonderful, unique, purely Miyazaki kind of film. Clara loved it. But even Felix couldn’t remember it all that well from whenever he had last seen it.

I love Miyazaki’s films, and I’ve loved sharing them with my kids. I think it’s great that they both like his movies so much. Miyazaki is for the ages.

My childhood favorite Godzilla movie. The title itself is just plain awesome. But the real reason that this movie was a childhood favorite was because it featured “all of the monsters” (more my perception at the time).

Okay, half of those you’re probably not going to know who they are or where they came from. Part of what’s cool and funny about the movie is how all of the characters recognize them like movie stars: “Look! It’s Manda!” (This Manda appeared in Atragon “Undersea Warship” (1963) — I didn’t know. I’m taking Wikipedia’s word for it.)

I had actually seen this about 10 years ago while on hiatus from the film diary, so I hadn’t written about it at the time. So, I’d kind of learned that this wasn’t really the “best” Godzilla movie of all time (though it still gets credit for concept and title).

All of the monsters are living on “Monsterland” or “Monster Island” depending on the translation. That’s when an alien race appears and takes control of the monsters’ minds and has them attack spots around the globe. Eventually, they besiege Japan, of course. When the humans take control of the monsters, the aliens bring in space monster Ghidorah and at the end, we get an all out monster battle. But it takes a while to get there.

It had been a while since the kids and I had watched a real Godzilla movie. Oddly enough, Destroy All Monsters and Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973) were the two of the original Godzillas that I couldn’t get my hands on via Netflix back in the time we originally were watching them. Now, those two are on Fandor. And interestingly enough, Christmas weekend, Roberto Rodriguez’s El Rey television network was having a kaiju-fest, featuring a lot of Godzilla movies, but these two were not on the list.

This year’s Halloween Horror Fest marathon I allowed to extend one day into November since the kids were out trick-or-treating on actual Halloween. But for our final films of 2014’s version of our horror marathon, I thought we would turn to a genuinely scary movie, 1998’s Ringu.

It’s the movie that launched the J-Horror movement (not that it was the first but the most successful) and imports, re-makes, and imitators onward for years to come. And while The Blair Witch Project (1999) happened around the same time and also had tremendous influence on the horror genre, I would be willing to say hands-down that the scares and motifs of Ringu have more depth and tenacity than the cheap thrills of faux found footage horror.

Because what Ringu trades on more than anything is a pervasive creeping fear of something unknown, a handful of confusing, disturbing images, and an overall sense of eeriness and doom.

Re-made in the states by Gore Verbinski in 2002 as The Ring, I have to say that I was a little torn as to which film to show the kids, the original Japanese film or the Naomi Watts version that hewed closely to the original. The real perk was not having to read subtitles to the kids and just to let them get pulled in. But I myself saw the original Ringu on video from Le Video back in 1999 or 2000 and was genuinely impressed/freaked out. I erred to the side of the original.

It’s easy enough to explain to the kids: there is this weird, creepy VHS video that if you watch it, you get a phone call and then you die one week later. Like 1996’s Scream, Ringu begins with the prelude, the legend upon which the story is passed. It’s only when a television journalist and her ex-husband start to investigate the story that the video is found and watched again, triggering a need to solve the mystery behind the tape in hopes of removing the curse.

It’s a more classic and traditional approach to horror, with crafty camerawork, dissonant music, building terror that makes the film develop into the lingering horror that it has. But not only that, there is the mystery at the core: where did these images come from? What is actually happening? The dread, the suspense, this is what the legacy of Ringu has, the influence of more refined storytelling, of building a sense of terror, not just creepy-looking things, nor quick-passing images nor just jumps and soundtrack explosions. And certainly not shaky hand-held camera contrived to have been shot by characters in the story. Hear, Hear to cinematography!!!

And did Ringu scare the kids? You bet your life. Both of them said that they thought it was the scariest movie that they’d ever seen. Up there above Annabelle (2014), Poltergeist (1982), The Others (2001), and House on Haunted Hill (1959) (the one that I didn’t think would make the impression that it did).

I asked the kids to think of why Ringu was so scary. What is it that made them afraid? And it was hard for them to articulate. And maybe that’s true overall. There are some effective images, none less than the girl crawling from the television. But it’s the unknown, the weirdness, and the overall film-making efficacy.

There is a lot more to discuss re: Ringu, like its true legacy, its literal legacy in the past 15 years. The whole “urban legend” aspect, or even the turning-point technology upon which the whole film is based, coming in 1998 at the tail end of the VHS era, perhaps the best VHS-based horror film of all time. I still vividly recall watching the film for the first time. And for all my love and appreciation of horror films, very, very few actually scare me or freak me out. Ringu did when I first saw it. And that, believe me, is not something I have to say about just anything.

After watching The Manster, a strange American-Japanese horror film from 1959, I have nothing but regret that I’d never caught the strange thing before. I’ve spent some time trying to figure this out. I’ve been watching horror films for over 40 years and The Manster is one that I feel certainly played on television in my childhood, but that I somehow shunned and missed. Why? Why? Why? It’s really cool.

The only thing that I’ve come to in trying to think why I never saw this is oddly two-fold. One, maybe the name of the movie just failed to speak to me. It sounds campy, not scary, maybe even to a child of 7 in the 1970’s. The other fact, which certainly could have dovetailed with the first is that the film is classified as one of those “two-headed monster man” movies, like The Incredible 2-Headed Transplant (1971) and The Thing with Two Heads (1972). Those movies surely have camp value, but they are more camp than monster movie.

The Manster is by no means such a true parallel. First of all, it comes over a decade earlier, essentially a very different era of movie making. Secondly, it is literally an American-Japanese production, set in Japan with a strong sense of Japanese culture, and Japanese actors, giving it a less generic sensibility too. Thirdly, this is not the case of a transplanted head, but a drug-induced parasitic twin that appears in part as a second head on a man’s shoulders.

The movie starts off with a monster attacking a woman, a doctor killing the monster in his laboratory, where he has yet another monster caged. He even mentions that the one he killed was his brother. This doctor, Dr. Robert Suzuki, is mad, of course. What he is trying to achieve is apparently some evolutionary kickstart, but to what end? Who knows? So far, he’s done a pretty terrible job.

But in walks American reporter Larry Stanford (Peter Dyneley), who has been sent to see what he can find on the doctor’s work. The doctor spots another healthy specimen for his experiments in Stanford and quickly starts drugging him and befriending him. Stanford has been in Japan for some time and is about to return to his wife in the states, but Suzuki’s influence introduces him to the world of sake, geishas, and public baths and quickly Stanford doesn’t want to go home to his wife but keep partying it up in Japan.

Only, he’s developing a monster hand. And eventually finds an eyeball growing on his shoulder. This eyeball will develop eventually into a head and even further eventually into a wholly new entity.

One of the key charms of the film are its lurid and effective FX. This demonic-seeming evolution reflects devils depicted in Japanese temples. Is he essentially channeling some historical Japanese spirit? The visual effects are very cool.

It’s also a bit of a psychological study. A descent into booze and debauchery, that turns Stanford into a different man not just physically but psychologically. He shuns his wife for the mysterious Japanese beauty, Suzuki’s assistant, who he’s fallen for. There is a very valid and real sense of emotional change going on in Stanford, organically or inorganically triggered, that speaks to the change that drugs, alcohol, or even emotional crisis can bring about. Stanford’s boss and wife try to intervene, but he’s been evolving away too long.

It’s a strange, unusual, cool, interesting, and a bit campy horror film. Way cooler than anything I’ve seen it compared to. It’s really pretty doggone awesome. How I’ve missed it all these years, I dunno.

Last note on the topic is that this is the first movie I’ve watched from Amazon Prime streaming. I guess I didn’t realize what all they had available with services that I was already paying for. Their content isn’t super deep or even super-easy to sort through (the categorizations are weird), but they have lots of cool stuff for free and lots more for pay. It won’t be the last movie that I stream from Amazon, that’s for sure.

You might think that Entrails of a Beautiful Woman was some type of sequel to Entrails of a Virgin (1986). Though both films come from Kazuo Komizu and are both Japanese “pink” films, a genre of “softcore” pornography, the films have pretty much nothing to do with one another from a narrative perspective. They do share something of an aesthetic adherence to gonzo gore out outre teasing perversity.

Entrails of a Beautiful Woman begins with a gang of yakuza abusing a young girl who is trying to find her sister. The gang has already abused and discarded her sister to the African slave trade via Manila and now plans to do the same with this girl. After her drug induced captors pass out, she escapes to a clinic where she is cared for by a nurse/doctor(?) who hears her whole story. The girl then jumps to her death. But the nurse/doctor plans her revenge on the yakuza using hypnosis and eventually summoning some bizarro demon or something to wreak havoc.

Clocking in at 68 minutes, it’s kind of odd but the film still only manages to go really really crazy in its last quarter. Komizu has a true penchant for perversity. For a film that never shows a pubic hair, the suggestive innuendo is about a thousand times more explicit than a mere photographic image of a vagina might be. Whether it’s a silhouette of a woman slobbering on a penis, ejaculate liquids wiped onto a mouth, prosthetic erections being rubbed through underwear, it’s more crass and explicit that hardcore pornography.

But the real fun comes in the form of this demon that is sort of a skinless atrocity of human form. S/he has an erection with a toothed mouth (not unlike a penile version of the baby Alien (1979) if you can imagine that). And if you can imagine what kinds of chaos such a projection would get up to. But then this penis also manages to invert itself into the body of the beast and turn into a vagina, with which it suffocates one of its yakuza victims.

It’s pretty bananas.

Entrails of a Virgin brought to mind Takashi Miike. Without a doubt Kazuo Komizu is a progenitor of Miike and Shinya Tsukamoto (Tetsuo the Iron Man (1992)). It’s quite amazing how much sleaze and suggestion he manages to cram into these films.

I began this year with a plan to watch many of the “great films” that I had never seen, but then got sidetracked on an alternate path to watch “the worst” movies of all time. The alternate path has been more attuned to my present place in the world, but I have been feeling the need to return to my original, possibly more lofty goal.

I’d never seen Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu, nor any of Mizoguchi’s other films. All I really knew was he was a big name and I was familiar with the titles of several of his movies. And that these were among the Japanese films that Janus originally brought to America and now reside on Criterion, both arbiters of what has come to be known as “World Cinema”, certainly the World Cinema that came to define the term.

Ugetsu is an elegantly shot feature, based on Ueda Akinari’s “Ugetsu Monogatari” (“Tales of Rain and the Moon”). Set in the 16th Century, the story follows the lives of two couples who work together in a small village as ceramic craftsmen. Genjurō (Masayuki Mori) is the master artisan who seeks money for his wife and child. Tōbei (Eitaro Ozawa), his assistant, seeks glory as a samurai. The war-torn province is both serious threat to their lives and their families, but also opportunity to cash in on their dreams.

At great risk, the two men manage to rescue their latest batch of ceramics and head out across the fog-strewn lake while fighting and piracy reign the night, heading to a larger town to try to sell their wares. Once in the city, with sales raging successfully, Tōbei runs off and buys armor, abandoning his friend and wife, seeking glory and wealth, which he eventually falls into not through honorable battle but through sneakier means. Genjurō, on the other hand, is seduced by a noble lady who admires his work and is keen to find a husband.

Both Genjurō and Tōbei’s wives suffer in their absence. Tōbei’s wife is raped and turned to prostitution. Genjurō’s honorable wife is murdered in the pestilence and famine that rule the land in his absence. Both men lose everything in the greedy profiteering that sends them. Genjurō’s story falls into the fantastic as his seductress turns out to be a ghost and when he finally escapes and returns home, he meets his wife’s ghost. Tōbei encounters his wife in a brothel, horrified by what has become of them, he discards all his armor and trappings, takes her back and returns to the village.

The film’s final moment, with the families again together, working more humbly in their old homes, has a classic beauty, as the child brings the mother’s grave some food, as her voice from beyond speaks (unheard) of her ever-presence.

I don’t know what all the writing about the film has been about, though I know that this film had many admirers in the United States like Roger Ebert and Martin Scorsese. It seems that this film is possibly an admonition against the Japanese during WWII, those who sought personal achievement, either in wealth or power or glory, abandoning their families, their humility, and losing everything. As a moral tale, the lesson seems clear. But, coming as the film does in 1953, it seems a very reasonable interpretation.

On a recent little bit of internet digging, which I sometimes refer to as “research”, I tumbled intentionally down a hole looking for “the most disgusting movies ever made” and I strangely found some rather keen and typical themes. What disgusts one might not disgust another, but there do indeed seem to be a number of films that consistently make these lists, but unsurprisingly not all of these are readily available from Netflix (streaming or DVD) or HuluPlus.

One odd variant from that fact is Tokyo Gore Police, which is available on Hulu, along with a few other modern Japanese horror/science fiction films that seem to want to push the boundaries of taste, culture, and anyone’s available hot buttons.

It’s set in a futuristic Tokyo with a privatized police force and villains who take drugs that allow them to morph their wounds into weapons, very Cronenberg-esquely. The precedents for things like this also tie into Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1992) as well as a lot of bondage, manga, anime, and you name it in this utter mash-up of things and ideas.

To its credit, some of the practical effects of prostheses and dismemberments, growths and spurting blood are very nice. And the film has a few real surprising images and ideas up its sleeves. There is even a very camp Paul Verhoeven quality to the satire and the commercials depicting this madcap future state.

But the film’s biggest shortcoming is the cheapness of its look which I think is due to the type of high definition video it seems to have been shot on. Some video these days is almost indiscernible from film, but some video still looks a lot like video and I’ll be the first to admit that I have a personal snobbery and dislike for video. I am willing to bet that if this movie had been shot on film, I might have liked it a whole lot more.

Don’t get me wrong, this is just my opinion, but it effected my liking for the film. I just kept thinking how crappy and TV so many shots looked, which was definitely not drawing me in.

I have been watching lots of “bad” movies lately and it’s not cheapness for cheapness sake that I have been revolting against. Some cheapness has great charm. Some bad moviemaking has great charm.

Some bad movie-making is just annoying. And I’ll say it again. This comment on Tokyo Gore Police has got everything to do with my disdain for the aesthetics of the camera here. Right or wrong. I don’t care.

The X from Outer Space has become available from Criterion via their “Eclipse Series 37: When Horror Came to Shochiku,” which is actually useful to know if you’re trying to place this film in understanding. For one question might rise, “Why The X from Outer Space as opposed to other kaiju films?” But seeing it in the context of the Shochiku studio going ‘horror’, well, that makes sense.

It’s a nice-looking flick, with some excellent miniatures and FX. And the monster, Gialala, as he’s called, is kind of cool-looking. Straight out of central casting for Ultraman if you ask me. Otherwise, it’s an earnest little affair about a trip to Mars that brings back an organism that sucks energy and terrorizes Japan. But on the surface, it’s nothing tremendous or unique. That’s why I recommend the article on the Criterion site.

I’ll probably be working my way through the other films of the series in coming weeks so will no doubt return to the subject in more depth.

Well, I’ve finally completed the series of films known as “Baby Cart”, the Lone Wolf and Cub movies from the early 1970’s adapted from the long-running manga. And sadly, and probably unsurprisingly, the final film is probably the weakest of the series.

It seems that this wasn’t necessarily the finale for the series, but rather it just turned out to be that way. The Yagyū clan who has been seeking revenge on Ogami Ittō (Tomisaburo Wakayama) and his son Daigoro are upping their game. The final battle in this film takes place in the snow.

The series itself is pretty great with four of the six movies directed by Kenji Misumi and all coming in quick succession in a matter of 2 or 3 years. Misumi died in 1975 at the age of 54, so maybe his health had something to do with the handing over of the fourth and sixth episode to other directors. Speculation, on my part.

Part Five of this six-part film series, known as the “Baby Cart” series, Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in the Land of Demons features a return from director Kenji Misumi, who sat out the prior installment Lone Wolf and Cub: Baby Cart in Peril (1972).

It starts out with this rather odd and amusing series of strangers that encounter the Lone Wolf, seeking to employ him to assassinate someone. Each progressive encounter involves a fight to the death to test him and provide him more information on the hit. It’s actually a rather complicated narrative about a lord who has replaced his son, the right heir to his shogunate with his daughter by a concubine, a letter he wrote that describes this, a monk unto whom he has sent this message, and the monk’s actuality as some double agent spy leader of another killer group.

There is also a rather long aside about a pickpocket who tries to embroil the Cub in an escape plan of hers and a public punishment of the stoic lad.

I’m kind of curious if this series really has an end in its final installment, or really it turns out to be just another leg in an ongoing saga. The titles of the films indicate a further push into the depths of evil and hell, which is echoed in the story.